Should Dictionaries Do More to Confront Sexism?

After a recent controversy over dictionary entries containing examples like “rabid feminist” and “nagging wife,” lexicographers must decide whether it’s possible to describe the language without sanctioning its ugly side.

Illustration by Roman Muradov

A few days after the Democratic Presidential debate in January, Michael Oman-Reagan, a doctoral student in anthropology at the Memorial University of Newfoundland, was composing a tweet about the problems with American voters, and he was searching for the perfect word. The idea of a “rabid sports fan” popped into his head and struck him as just the attitude he was seeking to convey. He pulled up the definition of “rabid” on his Mac’s dictionary, whose content is licensed from Oxford Dictionaries; he wanted to make sure that the word was as pejorative as he intended. It was, and so was the example phrase provided: “a rabid feminist,” it read.

Alarmed by what struck him as a dated and offensive construction, Oman-Reagan took a screen shot of the page and tweeted it at Oxford Dictionaries with the suggestion, “maybe change that?” When he woke up the next morning, he found that his rebuke had been retweeted and favorited hundreds of times, and his followers were sending him their own discoveries. Apple’s example sentence for “shrill” referenced “women’s voices,” and the one for the word “psyche” read, “I will never really fathom the female psyche.” Oman-Reagan found that the pronouns in entries for “doctor” and “research” were male, while a “she” could be found doing “housework.” He kept up his barrage on Oxford, which finally issued a flippant response on Friday: “If only there were a word to describe how strongly you felt about feminism.” It added, in a subsequent tweet, “Our example sentences come from real-world use.” The online melee that ensued left no one unscathed. Oman-Reagan says that his detractors started at least two online forums devoted to harassing him, while the head of content creation at Oxford Dictionaries, Katherine Connor Martin, told me that watching men’s-rights activists defend the dictionary was, for her, “not a proud moment.” Oxford ultimately tweeted an apology, with a promise to review the “rabid” example sentence, but made no public mention of “shrill,” “psyche,” or the other problem entries.

Feminists and linguists have been talking about the sexism that lurks beneath the surface of dictionaries since at least the nineteen-sixties. The question of how to eradicate it is bound up in a broader debate about the role of lexicography: Should dictionaries be proscriptive, establishing a standard of usage, or should they be descriptive, reflecting usage as it exists in the world? In the eyes of editors, their mandate is the latter. As the University of Oxford linguist Deborah Cameron puts it, when Oxford Dictionaries says its examples “come from real-world use,” it’s suggesting that “the sexism is in the world, and we just describe it.” This reasoning turns out not to hold up in the case of “rabid feminist,” though: Oxford tweeted that when its lexicographers searched their corpus—the archive of linguistic data, drawn from books, newspapers, and other writing, from which most dictionaries select example sentences—they found that combinations like “rabid fan” and “rabid supporter” were more commonly used; therefore, linguists told me, the entry might warrant adjusting for reasons of accuracy as well as sensitivity. The solution isn’t so obvious when it comes to words such as “housework” and “shrill,” or in other cases where Oxford’s corpus may confirm that the most representative usage is, indeed, a sexist one. To address these larger patterns, dictionary editors—and readers—must decide whether it’s possible to hold up a mirror to language without sanctioning its ugly side.

In “Websters’ First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the English Language,” a feminist dictionary published in 1987, the radical philosopher and activist Mary Daly wrote an entry for a word of her own coinage: “Dick-tionary,** *n: any patriarchal dictionary: a derivative, tamed and muted lexicon compiled by dicks.” Rooting out the sexism in dictionaries was a priority for feminism’s second wave. The nineteen-seventies and eighties witnessed a profusion of alternative volumes like Daly’s, which highlighted biases that belied mainstream dictionaries’ descriptive ideals. Deborah Cameron, writing about feminist dictionaries, has cited the example of the word “lesbian,” which wasn’t included in the Oxford English Dictionary until 1976, roughly two centuries after it entered common usage. (The O.E.D. is Oxford’s “historic” dictionary, intended to reflect the entire evolution of language, whereas the New Oxford American Dictionary, which appears on Apple products in North America, is a “synchronic” dictionary that aspires to provide a snapshot of usage at the time of publication.) When “lesbian” finally was added, the entry included as an example sentence a quote from the writer Cecil Day-Lewis: “I shall never write real poetry. Women never do, unless they’re invalids, or Lesbians, or something.” Alternative dictionaries—and dyketionaries, as some were called—also critiqued the very concept of a book that could reflect society with dispassionate objectivity. Cameron cites the entry for “cuckold” in “A Feminist Dictionary,” published in 1985, which notes that “The wife of an unfaithful husband is just called wife.” (In fact, “cuckold” does have a feminine correlate—“cuckquean,” which appears in the O.E.D.—but the word is considered obsolete and does not appear in common-use dictionaries.) Underscoring that sexual double standard is not “neutral”—but neither, feminist linguists argue, is ignoring it, as mainstream dictionaries do.

Lexicographers are more aware of these complexities than most of their readers are. When I called Merriam-Webster, the editor-at-large, Peter Sokolowski, read me a series of internal memos, written in the nineteen-eighties and nineties, which stipulate that terms with feminine endings must have their own entries and be defined on their own terms: “abbess” cannot be included as a subsidiary under “abbot”; just as a “waiter” is “a man who serves food or drinks,” a “waitress” should be defined as “a woman who serves food or drinks” rather than as “a female waiter.” The Linguistic Society of America’s “Guidelines for Nonsexist Usage,” released in 1996, urge lexicographers to “avoid peopling your examples exclusively with one sex” and to “avoid gender-stereotyped characterizations” in their illustrative sentences. Steve Kleinedler, the executive editor of the American Heritage Dictionary, told me that he also notes how often women appear as the subjects of verbs, and how often as objects. Oxford’s Connor Martin told me, “We have had conversations about the vision of the world expressed through pronouns and example sentences before this time. On the other hand, whatever our personal feelings may be about particular social issues . . . we don’t have a political intent.”

But the choices about what to include in a dictionary, like the construction of any historical record, are, arguably, inherently political. There is a circular logic to the descriptivist ethos: lexicographers say that the words and meanings they add to the dictionary have already been validated by the public’s use, but, to the public, a word’s inclusion in the dictionary is the thing that legitimizes it. For this reason, feminist linguists argue that, in some instances, lexicographers should put a thumb on the scale. In a corpus, “it may be that the most common collocate feels a little sexist, or a little something else,” Anne Curzan, a historian of English at the University of Michigan, told me. “As an editor, you can decide to use the second most common example.” Connor Martin told me that she and her colleagues often look for example sentences without gendered pronouns, especially to illustrate socially “fraught” words. Sarah Shulist, a linguistic anthropologist at MacEwan University, suggests that if the corpus shows gendered usage for a word, like “shrill,” lexicographers can choose to reflect that fact, but they should mark it as pejorative instead of presenting it without comment. Dictionaries have increasingly relied on labels to demarcate racist language, for instance, since the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People threatened to boycott Merriam-Webster over its definition of the N-word, in 1997. (The entry back then read, “a black person—usu. taken to be offensive”; today, Merriam-Webster notes that the word “ranks as perhaps the most offensive and inflammatory racial slur in English.”) “It’s standard practice with slurs to mark them as a slur,” Shulist said. “The real question is where to draw the boundary. I think they should move it.” For lexicographers, making this shift might mean acknowledging that words such as “overbearing” and “hysterical,” or “bossy” and “nagging”—two more entries whose gendered examples Oman-Reagan and his followers flagged as sexist—have never been neutral.

After “rabid”-gate, as some linguists have taken to calling it, Connor Martin says that she’s more aware than ever of Oxford’s role as an arbiter of language—whether she and her colleagues like it or not. “We need to know that the dictionary, as an institution, has a cultural power beyond the sum of its parts,” she told me. “And that does carry with it a responsibility to realize that we exist within that tension, and to not always hide behind the idea of descriptivist lexicography.” But while it’s axiomatic that language evolves, it’s in the nature of dictionaries to lag at least one step behind that evolution. The sheer size of a dictionary such as the New Oxford American—not to mention a multi-volume historic dictionary such as the O.E.D.—means that the vast majority of entries will go for years or decades without being formally reëxamined. In the meantime, the responsibility to question the compendiums’ contents falls on ordinary users. Curzan told me, “We tend to defer to the dictionary as authoritative. But when it’s about ourselves, or people we know and love, we feel more ownership. We feel more authorized to say, ‘Wait a minute. That doesn’t seem right to me.’

This post has been changed the clarify that there is a feminine correlate for the word “cuckold.”